The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) staff were reportedly told to retract an analysis of suspicious oil trades tied to President Donald Trump's reversal on an Iran power plant attack, according to Bloomberg reporting by Charles Gorrivan, Lydia Beyoud and Nicola M White.
When Trump backed away from threats to strike Iranian power plants on March 23, it sparked a frenzy of buying and selling across oil, equities and other markets. Billions of dollars' worth of contracts predicting oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise were placed about 15 minutes before the president announced his U-turn on Truth Social, fueling speculation about whether someone had an unfair advantage.
A team of career forensic analysts in the CFTC's Division of Market Oversight reviewed the trading and filed a referral to the Division of Enforcement, which would decide whether to pursue a full-scale insider trading investigation. What happened next, people familiar with the matter said, was highly unusual: Mel Gunewardena, a senior adviser to Chairman Michael Selig, told a supervisor to retract the referral. It was unclear how the team could carry out such an action, since it had rarely, if ever, been done before.
An adviser to a political appointee was reportedly intervening to oversee the evidence gathering himself, a break from precedent. Former enforcement director Aitan Goelman said such an intervention would have been unprecedented in previous administrations. The CFTC declined to comment, and an agency official said the review would be broadened to international markets, a task Gunewardena, a former Goldman Sachs and State Street executive, was best placed to lead.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing